Thy Neighbor's Wife (33 page)

N
OT LONG AFTER
John Williamson had become the lover of Judith Bullaro, he resigned as a partner of his electronics firm, sold his company stock for nearly $150,000, and put a down payment on the secluded mountain retreat that would become his love community. The property was located 1,700 feet above the Pacific Ocean on the upper ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains, eight miles from Malibu Beach and an hour’s drive from downtown Los Angeles; and to reach it most directly from the Pacific Coast Highway a motorist had to drive up narrow, winding roads that presented a dazzling view of danger and beauty, a frightening route that climbed through the hovering haze of the valley and over slanted treetops, rimming the edge of steep cliffs, swerving inward toward the yellow stone of the mountainside, curving out again toward the unguarded edge of the road, cutting in sharply toward the mountain, then back to the open sky and the risk of a precipitous fall—it was a zigzagging, vertiginous ride made tolerable only by the contemplation of sexual pleasure that was waiting at the end of the journey.

Sandstone Retreat, built on the south side of the mountain, was entered by way of a private drive marked by two stone pillars; and its main residence, which stood one-quarter mile beyond the gate, was a large white two-story house perched on a concrete slab and surrounded by eucalyptus trees and ferns, a fish pond
with a cascading fountain, and a manicured front lawn so smooth it could be used as a putting green. From the second-story redwood sun deck of the house could be seen the Pacific coastline, white specks of distant sailboats, and the misty silhouette of Catalina island. Behind the courtyard of the house, where the rocky land rose higher, there were smaller stucco houses reached by wooden steps, and also a large glass-doored building with a beamed ceiling that sheltered an Olympic-sized pool in which people swam in the nude.

Many years ago Sandstone’s fifteen acres, and the adjoining land that extended for miles across the mountainside, were owned by wealthy ranchers and such Hollywood figures as Lana Turner; but when Williamson first inspected the area with a realtor in 1968, he saw only signs of isolation and decay, dust-covered buildings and bumpy dirt roads obstructed by fallen boulders and mounds of sun-baked mud. The nearest grocery store was miles below in the canyon, where the rustic Topanga shopping center was a rendezvous for dope-dealing hippies and leather-jacketed motorcycle gangs, and where dozens of undernourished dogs wandered listlessly across the main road and with reluctance yielded to honking motorists.

When Williamson first showed the Sandstone property to those who were to be part of the commune, they were far from impressed; they considered the site to be too remote and decrepit, and they knew that it would take many months of hard labor to make the houses habitable and to repair the broken roads.

But Williamson nevertheless bought the property, and, after appealing to their adventurous spirit and their often-expressed desire to escape the frenzy and smog and confinements of the city, he gradually persuaded them that this was an ideal setting for their sensual utopia. Williamson was stubborn and convincing. Like the founding fathers of other Utopian settlements in the past, he was unhappy with the world around him. He regarded contemporary urban life in America as destructive to the spirit, organized religion as a celestial swindle, the federal government as cumbersome and avaricious; he saw the average wage
earner, who was excessively taxed and easily replaced, as existing only with detached participation in a computerized society.

Williamson’s followers, with few exceptions, shared his dismay. Like him, they had worked within the system and found it limiting, and each welcomed an escape from the tedium of their private lives and marriages. Most of them had been divorced at least once and had grown up in families that had been oppressive or unstable. Oralia Leal, the first of seven children born into a Mexican-American family in southern Texas, had fled familial poverty and the sexual molestations of older male relatives to work her way through a junior college in Los Angeles, only to become ensnared in a dreadful marriage and a series of boring jobs as a corporate secretary or receptionist. Arlene Gough, an “army brat” born in Spokane, the daughter of a career sergeant, spent her girlhood traveling from base to base with her parents, became pregnant at sixteen, and was married two more times before she was thirty. The red-haired Gail, reared in an ascetic Irish-Catholic home in the Midwest, experienced sex for the first time at the age of twenty-seven with her fiancé, after which her mother sent her to a priest to seek forgiveness. The engineer David Schwind, who worked at an unfulfilling job at Douglas Aircraft, was a product of remote and conservative parents in small-town Ohio, where his main relief from monotony was found in the pages of
Playboy
or during his nocturnal prowls outside the neighboring bedroom window of an attractive older woman.

The others in Williamson’s clique came from similarly unexalted backgrounds; they were people in their late twenties and early thirties who had passed quietly and uncommittedly through the youth-centered 1960s without experiencing much meaning in their lives or hope for self-improvement until they had met Williamson and become lured into his love net. With the help of his wife, Williamson had used sexual freedom as a way of linking their lives to his own and including them in a group marriage that he believed would effectively meet their needs for affection, emotional support, a commitment to something larger than them
selves, and a sense of familial warmth that they had previously lacked.

At Sandstone he provided them with living quarters and an environment that was more luxurious than anything they could have afforded in the city below; and while everyone had duties to perform on the property, Williamson encouraged the men and women to disregard tradition and share the domestic chores in the kitchen as well as the more male-oriented duties in the outdoors. At night, when the day’s work was done, Williamson listened with interest and patience to whatever they wished to reveal about themselves and their anxieties; he was a combination therapist and teacher, a leader to the men, a lover to the women.

He had wooed one by one each of the half-dozen women who were now part of his circle, and by sharing his wife with the men, and creating a permission-giving atmosphere that fostered open sexuality within the group, he believed that he was forming the nucleus of a cult that would soon appeal to many other couples who truly believed in coequal relationships.

John Bullaro, however, remained somewhat skeptical of Williamson’s intentions; and the main reason he continued to associate with Williamson’s group was that his wife, Judith, refused to leave it. She was awed by Williamson, insisted on having sex with him often, and she supported Williamson’s plan primarily because it advocated greater freedom for women and denounced the double standard. After years of frustration as a Valley housewife, Judith had finally found a cause that appealed to both her mind and her body, and John Bullaro was resigned to the fact that if he wished to save his marriage—and he now did more than ever, partly in the interest of his own ego—he had little choice but to remain close to the group and hope that Judith’s attraction to Williamson was merely a passing fancy, a symptom of her capricious and restless nature.

Meanwhile, Bullaro’s involvement with the group was on his own terms: He enjoyed the sexual experiences with the willing women who surrounded Williamson—Barbara, Arlene, Gail, and the exotic Oralia, to whom he had finally made love—but at the
same time he did not consider himself answerable to Williamson’s wishes. Unlike the other men who had quit or neglected their jobs in order to live and work full-time with Williamson on the restoration of the property, Bullaro continued to appear each day at his office at New York Life, and each night he rejoined his wife and the others at the main house in time for dinner or drinks after they had spent the day scraping floors, painting walls, chopping wood, trimming hedges, and, in the case of Williamson and David Schwind, maneuvering two bulldozers up and down the hilly driveways removing boulders and smoothing out the roadbeds.

Although Bullaro had rented out his Valley home after the purchase of Sandstone, he did not move his family into the estate with the other couples but chose instead to lease a nearby ranch in Topanga Canyon, explaining to the Williamsons that his children were yet too young to be exposed to Sandstone’s adult freedom; and while he and Judith had hired an architect to design a house that they would presumably build in the near future on one of Sandstone’s higher hills, Bullaro privately had no intention of ever letting matters get that far. He was now marking time, indulging temporarily his wife’s newfound feminism, partaking in the group nudity and pleasure often available at the main house, and trying to conceal the deepening hostility and jealousy he felt toward the quiet, robust blond Williamson, who presently held Judith as a love hostage.

But one evening in the main house, where everyone was relaxing in the nude after a day of hard physical work in the sweltering heat, Bullaro could no longer conceal his animosity. He had driven up the hill from his office earlier in the evening pondering Williamson’s power over the group, and he concluded that it had less to do with any great wisdom or dynamism on Williamson’s part than to Williamson’s capacity to exploit the vast emptiness in these people’s lives.

Most people, Bullaro thought, were born followers, wanderers in search of guides, gullible disciples of any theorist or theologian, dictator, drug dealer, or Hollywood maharishi who prom
ised palatable cures and solutions. The trendy, rootless state of California was particularly receptive to novel ideas, and if a visionary man had great drive and determination, and was smart enough to remain sufficiently vague and elusive so that other people could superimpose upon him their ideals and fantasies, he would sooner or later attract his share of followers. Williamson was in this category, Bullaro believed, espousing a philosophy that ignored sin and guilt and celebrated pleasure. Williamson flattered his followers by calling them “change people,” attributing to them the power to change other people as they themselves had been changed into pioneering practitioners of Williamson’s sex theories. While Bullaro reluctantly acknowledged that Williamson had thus far changed Judith, he doubted that Williamson would be able to sell his lotus life-style to the vast market beyond the mountain—and this is precisely what Williamson had in mind; he eventually intended to merchandise his philosophy, to advertise the Sandstone project in the press and entice couples to pay a guest fee to visit his “change people” and share their pleasure and hopefully become converts. Williamson was a guru of the flesh.

Although Bullaro knew that Williamson would not agree with such a carnal assessment of the purpose and goals of Sandstone, he did not particularly care what Williamson thought about anything on this hot evening as he parked his car and walked into the main house to find Judith reclining nude on the sun deck next to Williamson, with the rest of the nude group talking quietly among themselves in the living room, mostly ignoring him.

After he had removed his clothes and hung them in the closet near the front door, Bullaro headed toward the sun deck, but stopped when he heard Barbara commenting sarcastically about his uncanny knack of arriving at Sandstone only after the group had finished the day’s work—to which he suddenly responded, in a loud voice, “Why don’t you shove it, Barbara? I don’t need any of your crap tonight!”

Barbara smiled, seeming pleased by her capacity to easily provoke him; but on the deck the supine John Williamson slowly
rolled over, got up on his elbows, and, looking at Bullaro, asked with irritation: “Why can’t you ever listen to what she’s saying without letting your bloated ego get in the way?”

“Because,” Bullaro said, “I don’t think
she’s
any great judge of character. She should be spending her time trying to solve her own problems, which are many, without spending time nagging me.”

Williamson quietly shook his head, as if deciding that the issue was really too silly to discuss; but Bullaro, glaring down at Williamson, went on angrily: “And why don’t you let her fight her own battles? Or is she incapable without your great support and guidance?”

As Williamson got to his feet everybody in the living room seemed uneasy, having never before heard Williamson addressed so curtly; and Judith also stood, her hand holding Williamson’s arm, allied with him against her husband.

“Barbara can take care of herself a hell of a lot better than you can,” Williamson announced firmly, his face red with anger. “You’re so constantly worried about failure that you don’t know what’s going on around you. Everybody has been working hard for months to get this place in shape so we can start making money and support what we think is important, and all you’ve been worrying about so far is your pathetic fucking ego.”

“You’re damned right I’m worried about my ego,” Bullaro shouted, “because this fucking group under your expert direction has been working full-time to tear it down—along with my family. Your biggest turn-on in life is fucking other men’s wives. You don’t seem to enjoy fucking your own very much!”

Williamson looked hard at Bullaro and said: “You just can’t stand the thought of your wife responding to other people, and growing as an individual. You would rather keep her locked in a closet while you continue your insidious little game of sneaky sex. Isn’t that how you got trapped in the first place?”

Before Bullaro could reply, Williamson abruptly strode past him, with Judith a step behind, leaving Bullaro standing alone near the sliding glass doorway of the sun deck. He felt his heart
pounding, and a mixture of fear and satisfaction. He had challenged Williamson, something he had previously lacked the courage to do, but now as he stood looking at the night sky he felt uncertain. He walked out onto the deck, where there was a slight breeze, and he sat in one of the low-slung chairs. He could see the distant lights from the coastline, could hear the crickets along the edge of the lawn. He knew he had lost Judith, at least for the time being, and while he admitted to being surprised by her loyalty to Williamson, he still believed that he would win her back when he wanted to,
if
he wanted to. At this moment he was not sure what he wanted.